My wife and I have been locked in a long battle over moving. She is about to graduate with her CRNA degree and as such she is searching for a new job. My career has been providing income for the past 3 years and while she was going to school and not around as much I told her I would be focusing on my career to help get us through. As such I went from 75K to almost 90K in the past three years, granted this has been hard on me but it has been well worth it to help not only support my wife's schooling, but also allow me to buy some cool new toys...

The battle we are in centers around a GREAT job offer for her in a completely different city three hours away from where we live now, versus a OK job in the city we live in now. If she takes the GREAT job we have to move and while I have been searching, I have not found anything in the new city yet. The new city does have opportunity, but I just haven't found a fit yet. The GREAT job is less pay for her than the OK job, but it provides a good work life balance and she loves the people she would work with. The OK job is more money but would cause her to work overtime and weekends with some people she likes, and other people she downright loathes...

The OK job would allow me to stay at my current company where I am well thought of and have good promotion potential. The GREAT job shows no prospects now...

The battle we are in is all about what is best for US. We went to workout this morning and the drive to the gym was quiet and tense due to a fight the night before. We went to spin class and had a good workout, then we got in the car and after about 2 minutes of tense silence my wife and I started fighting. It got heated, raised voices and dare I say some hurtful comments on both parties. She was saying that I was never excited for her opportunities, and I was saying no matter how hard I tried to adapt it was never good enough for her... As we got closer to home we both realized that we were fighting for the same outcome, "something beneficial for both of us." We both wanted the same thing but we were fighting because neither party felt understood and validated...

We got home and I was hungry (spoiler alert, the Nacho part of this blog post is coming up). So I put some chips and cheese and taco meat (from the tacos the night before that I had refrigerated) on a plate and microwaved them. I brought the heaping pile of cheesy, meaty, goodness to the table with some salsa on the side and motioned for her to join me...

And we ate. And we talked. The truth of the matter was, she was just as stressed out as I was and felt like I did not understand her. And I was just as stressed as she was and felt like she did not understand me. So we ate some nachos and figured out what our options really were...

The hardest part was being able to say the hard truths about how we felt. When you love you partner and care about their happiness, sometimes you can instinctively try to shield them from things they might not like, especially when it is something that you are trying to correct yourself. I had to tell her that I thought I had opportunity in the city with the GREAT job, but I was really scared and discouraged after months of searching and applying and not a single call back. She was feeling really insecure because many other people in her graduating class already had multiple offers and she just had two.

Most fights are really a result of a breakdown in communication rather than some fundamental flaw. There have been many times where both my wife and I have been saying the same thing but with different words and the understanding was not there. That is the great thing about a "Nacho Summit". We took a few moments to compose ourselves and each person spoke while the other was chewing... This allowed both parties to speak without interruption, and because we were both eating from the same plate we had to stay close to one another.

So next time you and your significant other are in a fight, maybe cook up a plate of nachos... Maybe some chips, cheese, and beef can be more than the sum of their parts, they could be a communication tool.

And even if the Nachos do not create the open communication that you are looking for, at least you won't be hungry.